CSCA AGM Featuring Joseph Vybihal

CSCA presents an online lecture from CSCA Montreal Chapter Leader, Joseph Vybihal (Software Engineer and McGill Professor) as a part of CSCA’s 2022 Annual General Meeting.

Evidence of Siloing Thought in Social Media

This talk will report on my study, co-authored with Mika Desblancs, of the siloing effect in YouTube of political thought. I will present evidence that users having a political bias (left or right) will see, over time, that their YouTube feed contains more information that aligns with their bias and less that challenges their bias. I will present evidence of a strategy that YouTube appears to be using to mitigate bias. I will discuss why their mitigation strategy is not sufficient from both a societal and Christian perspective, concluding by suggesting a better paradigm for a good recommendation system.

Joseph Vybihal has been a software engineer and university-level educator since 1990. His research interests have focused on intelligent computer systems, robotics, software engineering and education outreach. He has been an educator at Bishop’s University, Herzing Institute, and McGill University, where he is now. He was awarded best instructor in computer science at McGill in 2010. He runs a private consultancy that has managed and built multiple software engineering projects for institutions (hospitals and universities) and corporations (robotics, factories, financial companies, and property managers). His work experience includes writing software for Bell Northern Research, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the former CTO of a startup called Xypper.com. His education outreach experience includes a published paper in student outreach and the directorship of the McGill Computer Science “Be A Computer Scientist for a Week” day camp for 12 years. He is co-chair of the McGill Computer Science Undergraduate Committee, and one of the Discipline Officers for the Department of Science of McGill University. He chaired the committee tasked to write the EDI statement for the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He has co-authored two textbooks, Software Systems (Kendall Hunt, 3rd edition 2019) and Fortran, C and Algorithms (Kendall Hunt, 2002). He has published research papers in Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, IEEE’s Frontiers in Education, amongst other venues.